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KERRY CLAIM: The new jobs created since George W. Bush became president pay, on average, $9,000 a year less than the jobs they replaced.

BUSH CLAIM: John Kerry’s tax plan would increase taxes on 900,000 small-business owners.

Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. National telephone poll of adults Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample sizes: 1,669 for Kerry question, 1,731 for Bush question. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/- 2.4 percentage points.

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Kerry deceived plenty of voters himself. Throughout the campaign he hammered away at the idea that the economy, which was finally creating hundreds of thousands of jobs after losing 2.6 million of them during Bush’s first two and a half years in office, wasn’t producing good jobs. Kerry insisted that the new jobs were paying thousands of dollars less than the old jobs that had disappeared, and he even claimed economists could measure the gap precisely. He said it in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention and kept repeating it right through the third presidential debate, where he said, “The jobs the president is creating pay nine thousand dollars less than the jobs that we’re losing.”

That $9,000 figure was fanciful. It didn’t actually compare the wages of lost jobs to those of newer jobs, because nobody gathers statistics in a way that allows such precise job-to-job comparisons. We know of no reputable economist who endorsed Kerry’s figure, and quite a few who thought it was silly and misleading.

The existing evidence was mixed. One set of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that grouped workers into different industries—manufacturing, for example, or health care—did suggest that job quality was declining. But that analysis was contradicted by a separate set of BLS figures, based on a different survey and grouping workers by occupation: doctor, nurse, assembly-line worker, engineer. The second set of figures suggested that job quality was improving. The Brookings Institution economist Barry Bosworth, a former Carter administration official, called Kerry’s approach “very misleading,” and added: “We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to compare the rates of jobs lost to those gained because we just don’t have the information right now to do it. Trying to measure the gross flow of jobs is really futile.” And, we wish to add, deceptive.

Bogus as Kerry’s claim was, two of every three persons polled after the election said they found it truthful. And that even included a majority of those who said they voted for Bush: 56 percent of them believed Kerry’s baseless claim that new jobs paid $9,000 less than the old jobs.

Bush’s Pack of…Wolves

Political deceivers don’t always state their falsehoods outright; sometimes they merely imply them. But the effect can be just as bad. Our polling found that voters went to cast their ballots burdened by a severely distorted picture of both candidates, often because of deceptions subtly laid between the lines.

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Misleading TV Ad

Announcer: In an increasingly dangerous world—even after the first terrorist attack on America—John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations. By six billion dollars—cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.

(On screen: several wolves eye the camera, as if preparing to attack.)

Bush: I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.

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For example, one of the most deceptive ads of the 2004 campaign was a Bush commercial showing a pack of wolves, symbolizing terrorists about to attack. The announcer said Kerry had voted to cut intelligence spending “even after the first terrorist attack on America.” We don’t know whether that was intended to deceive, but it did. The “first attack” referred to was the truck bomb that went off in the parking garage under one of the World Trade Center towers more than a decade earlier—in 1993. But we spoke to many casual viewers who heard “first terrorist